Bill Olejniczak will give his sabbatical lecture entitled “The Warned and the Punished: A Comparative Approach towards Criminal Justice, Policing, and the Crime of Vagrancy in Eighteenth-century England and France” on Monday, April 9 @ 3:15 p.m. in Addlestone Library Room 227.
“English and French authorities saw vagrancy as a menacing crime in the eighteenth century. A comparative approach reveals that, contrary to the usual picture of contrasting kingdoms, French and English governments sought to vigorously suppress vagrancy in surprisingly similar ways. My study examines an underside of the world of migration and explores the social and cultural experiences of significant numbers of the laboring poor as they interacted with police, judicial, and correctional authorities. A study of vagrancy as crime sheds light on the changing nature of governance in both states as well as emerging new cultural assumptions of French and English elites about social disorder, the mobile poor, punishment, and poverty at the end of the eighteenth century. ”